Yo-El Ju

You know, sleep is a foundation of health, and getting insufficient sleep or irregular sleep, we're throwing off, you know, what we're supposed to be doing to...

you know, to clean up from the day and to rest and restore our bodies and our brains, you know, that we're supposed to be doing for 30% of our time.

So it's not surprising to me that there's poor health outcomes associated with that.

I will say, especially for neurodegenerative diseases, is that it can be hard to tease apart

whether it's poor sleep that contributes to those poor outcomes or whether those problems are present to a small degree and if that is manifesting as poor sleep.

So, you know, I think, you know, it's becoming very clear that there is a very long preclinical phase of Alzheimer's, of

Parkinson's, of all types of neurodegenerative diseases.

So I think it's possible that some of these studies that have not followed people for that long, that when they are doing cross-sectional analyses or following them for just a couple years, that they might be...

finding that people who have sleep problems, perhaps they already have preclinical disease.

So I think it's important when we look at those studies that we keep in mind the possibility that the relationship goes the other way.

So our circadian rhythms are separate from our sleep systems, but they have a very close relationship.

And I think of the circadian rhythm as the thing that sets the window for your best sleep.

So we've all flown a couple time zones.

We're going to bed, we feel tired, yet we can't get into good sleep.

And that is because we're not sleeping aligned with our circadian rhythms when we have jet lag.

So if we are sticking to our own circadian rhythms, and the majority of people aren't that off of typically sleeping at nighttime,

If we go to bed and get up at a regular time that aligns with our circadian rhythm, that's probably like the number one thing we can do to give ourselves the opportunity to get good sleep.

I will note that getting slow-wave sleep or deep sleep as measured by different wearables, that may not be the best metric to shoot for, and it can get frustrating because those algorithms can change.

Device-to-device differences in algorithms might end up showing different results.

you know, people are actually very sensitive to the quality of sleep that they got.